Blue Ridge Mountains

Southern Comforts

Riding the foothills of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, you may encounter DIY distilleries, escape-prone ornery bulls, and hills steep enough to threaten marital bonds. But on the Tour d’Epicure, you only have to pedal hard enough to make it to the next great meal.

jonathan miles

(Mathew Rakola)

By noon we were drinking: sprawled in lawn chairs at the Philip Carter Winery in Hume, rehydrating with a chilled rosé made from a rarely seen Portuguese grape varietal called tinto cào. With our lunch—fish en papillote—arrived more bottles, including a blend of vidal blanc and chardonnay the vintners call Governor Fauquier, after the elected official who certified the Carter family’s winemaking venture in 1763.

These and other bottles confirmed my opinion that Virginia is producing some of the best wines east of the...well, east of the West Coast, and not by any small margin. These and other bottles also left me feeling lazy and contented enough to consider bagging the 20-mile return trip, as most of the group did. (“I’m not really used to drinking midway through a ride,” I overheard someone say.) But my wife, in cahoots with the CIA, was hearing none of it. Four of us set off for what John grinningly cautioned was “the most challenging” section of the tour.

That’s partly owing to Divorce Hill, which appears on one of the quiet country roads near the end of the ride, jutting sharply upward for a third of a mile. John and Diane coined the name after a young couple honeymooning at the Foster Harris House—the groom a cyclist, the bride not—took some bikes out for a spin, encountered the climb, and came frighteningly close to marital collapse as the bride cursed her groom while walking her bike uphill. Half a decade later John was tickled to hear a noncycling local refer to it as Divorce Hill; the name had stuck.

In my case it was different: My bride made it up and over far ahead of me, but the only curses I uttered came when a pair of big mutty dogs came charging out of their hilltop yard. I managed a quick downhill escape, leaving the CIA to fight off the dogs. An ignoble act, in retrospect, but he took his vengeance by blurring past me on the final half-mile, a Mark Cavendish to my foolhardy and premature breakaway rider. In the course of 40 miles we’d climbed more than 3,000 feet, John informed us, which said to me that I was ready to put my wife’s theory to the test: dinnertime.

Patrick O’Connell started the Inn at Little Washington inside a converted auto-repair shop in 1978. At the time, he seemed clearly delusional. World-class cuisine in the middle of nowhere, more than 60 miles from a city? Who would come? The answer turned out to be everyone, and O’Connell went on to have one of the most storied careers in American chefdom, helping to pioneer the farm-to-table movement (out of necessity, as much as anything else, since the only staple he could get delivered was milk) and paving the way for destination chefs such as Thomas Keller—and this without ever abandoning the kitchen for casino-­based franchises or Food Network series or other cheffy temptations. (At 67 he still runs the line.) I started with lamb carpaccio with Caesar salad ice cream, followed by hot and cold foie gras with Sauternes jelly and rhubarb marmalade, then found myself swooning over curry-dusted veal sweetbreads with morels, Virginia country ham, and pappardelle pasta.